Resetting the Conversation

I’ve spent fifteen years watching disaster management systems strain under the weight of events they weren’t built for — and wondering whether anyone else noticed the same patterns I did.

Earlier this month, I published Strategic Disaster Coordination: The Missing Architecture of Disaster Management. It’s an attempt to put structure around something I’ve been wrestling with for years: the idea that we don’t actually have a system designed to manage disasters. We have a system designed for emergencies, and when disasters occur, we scale it up and hope it holds.

Much of modern emergency management was built rapidly in the years following September 11th. In that process, we leaned heavily on first responder models — tools designed for discrete incidents, clear boundaries, and short operational timelines — and extended them into environments defined by scale, complexity, and prolonged disruption. Using ICS for strategic disaster coordination is a bit like using a fire engine’s radio system to coordinate the rebuilding of a city’s electrical grid. The radio works fine. It’s just not the most effective tool for the job.

The result is a system that often struggles not because of the people in it, but because of the architecture underneath them.

The book lays out that argument and introduces Strategic Disaster Coordination as a starting point for thinking about what’s been missing: an architecture for managing consequences across systems, organizations, and time — rather than trying to command or control them from a single point.

But it is intentionally not a finished product.

I’m calling it Edition Zero — a first draft meant to be read, challenged, and improved. If SDC argues that disaster management should be built more like an open-source network than a command hierarchy, it felt wrong to publish the framework any other way. It’s a foundation for conversation, not a final answer.

Where This Blog Goes from Here

This blog started before the book, and it will continue alongside it — but from a different angle. The book focuses on structure: how the system was built, why it behaves the way it does, and what’s architecturally missing. The blog focuses on experience: stories, observations, and questions from the field that reveal where that structure works, where it breaks, and where it creates consequences nobody intended.

Going forward, I’ll be pushing harder against some of the rhetoric, assumptions, and norms that shape how we do this work — including ones I’ve participated in myself. We have settled into using a system that was never designed for disasters, and that settling has costs we don’t talk about enough: in efficiency, in effectiveness, and in sustainability. When the tools we use in disasters aren’t designed for the environments we’re actually operating in, people can’t build real familiarity with them. They can’t develop the intuition that comes from understanding what a system does well and where it breaks down. Every disaster becomes a fresh improvisation instead of a practiced adaptation. I want to show what some of those costs look like from different angles — to hold up a mirror to practices we’ve normalized and ask whether what we see still makes sense.

I also want to make these arguments in plain language. Our field has spent decades building up terminology that often means different things to different people, and that ambiguity has a way of letting us talk past the hard questions instead of through them. If we’re going to have an honest conversation about what’s working and what isn’t, we need language that clarifies rather than insulates.

Because that’s what all of this should come back to. Not systems, not org charts, not coordination frameworks — people. Communities trying to stabilize their lives after everything got knocked sideways. Every structure we build, every process we follow, every dollar we spend should be measured against one question: does this help people more effectively? If it doesn’t, we need to be honest about why we’re still doing it.

An Open Invitation

If the book argues anything, it’s that disaster management is not something any one organization or level of government can solve alone.

So this is an open invitation. If you’ve worked in disasters, lived through one, studied them, or thought about them from a different angle, I hope you’ll engage with these ideas. Agree, disagree, add context. Some of what I’ll be writing challenges how we currently operate, and I think that conversation is overdue — but it only works if more than one voice is in it.

The goal isn’t a perfect framework. It’s something more honest, more effective, and more aligned with the reality of disasters as they actually happen.

More to come.